He did? If that is true I'd be a tad more confident about it. But I can't recall Royce working with anyone but Wests and I don't remember Lance playing for anyone but the Warriors?

Royce was first team coach at Penrith in 1997 but as for working with Lance I am not sure when he had the opportunity, but I have to admit I think Royce has said it before.

I don't think Saints can play Wellens at FB, he was awful in the semi final and just offers no injection of pace and he cannot create anything. The modern FB HAS TO to do that.

Personally I would do the same with Lomax as we have with Tomkins. Take the pressure off him, take the responsability of organising and kicking away from him and put him at FB to let his running game tear teams appart. FB is an extra half-back in the modern game anyway.

I think Gaskell and LH combination has a good balance about it.

I just remember Royce saying he had worked with him before, and with our two other new recruits as well.

Wouldn't it have been common sense to replace them tho?

I've known for best part of a month that Leon was going so I'd imagine the club knew a long time ago. We should have acted earlier and replaced him with a stand off.

We've known both eastmond and jammer was going fir a good while and I'd expect the club to have known a long time before.


So we've had time to search for good quality replacements.

We surely have to go

1 Lomax

6 Hohia
7 Gaskell

As per usual that makes a decent attacking trio [especially when you throw in Robes at 9 but we will be incredibly thread bare - Injury to one of those and we are reliant on Wheeler who is no game machine himself

We have replaced them. We will be getting another big bloke. All is fine with the world.

What did you want? Some NRL million dollar player? Dream on.


We have oodles of stand offs at the club.

non are close to leon as yet

Nope, although I would like to see Gary Wheeler actually get an extended run there - ha! - as I think he could be the closest. But 'yet' does not mean 'never' and we have Hohaia coming into the halves to bring experience to the team in that position and I'm not as doom and gloom as a lot of other people appear to be.

To be fair having a lesser standard of playing roster isn't going to mean that you are not going to be capable of winning things, I just look at other clubs including us and think that the standards are going to drop across the board apart from maybe at Catalans.

Wigan... losing Madge(Massive IMO), Hoffman, Coley, Deacon?. Big losses IMO and no new signings YET!
Warrington... Morley??? questions marks over his future. Briers is another year older, louis anderson, solomona(another off season on the pies!) J Monaghan? Hodgson a year older.
Leeds... well they signed richard Moore FGS
Catalans are the only ones I can see being significantly better that this..

I am willing to be contridicted by the way.

No ive never said get million dollar NRL player, I'm just saying it would have been nice to bring in a stand off for pryce, prop for Graham and someone to replace eastmond.

Agree with this, Lomax has the makings of a Tomkins and the freedom of linking into the play from the FB role could really suit him down to the ground. As the Wigunerrr says, it takes the pressure of a kicking game and directing a team around the park off, allowing him to go on his brilliant individual runs when he sees a chance.

My only concern would be the defensive side as his tackling in the halves isn't all that great.